Double Trouble

DJs and presenters Lisa and Alana Macfarlane – The Mac Twins – have got each other’s faces. They tell Standard Issue all about being twins that really don’t like sharing.

Posted on 24/02/2015

Twenty-something years ago a tiny little egg in the belly of a young Scottish woman with a questionable perm and a top-floor tenement flat decided to split itself in two. “Oh shit,” she muttered as the two little heart beats pumped happily away on the screen, “I sincerely hope it’s boys; might be easier.”

A few months later out trundles the first girl, taking all the good juicy white blood cells. Meanwhile her sister, pretty poorly and looking like Papa Smurf, but delighted with the space burls round and shoves her feet down the hole, otherwise known as ‘breach’.

Husband meanwhile is scoffing a Snickers and wondering how these little blonde scrawny wailers are going to pull off the names Greig and Murray, the product of hours of agonising debates punctuated by the slamming shut of baby name books. “Oh shit” thought the now panicking father, what will I do with them?” Turns out he adored them, even if they did have slap face, couldn’t walk due to excess tyres and had not one hair follicle on their head until their second year of life.

The twins were like unicorns: everyone stared and gasped and poked and compared and prodded, while they were planning elaborate double-act escape plans and running in opposite directions at the sight of a bath. One played cello and chess, the other plucked her guitar and continuously scribbled logic puzzles. They got top grades at school, top grades in ballet and top grades in teenage rebellion. After the ‘let us forget’ period of drinking in parks, stripy highlights and ironing they’re own hair, the girls emerged fairly well balanced with police records and school reports surprisingly intact.

As Lisa signed up for medical school and Alana applied for business and law, a wave of impulse rippled through the Macfarlane household. After more huffing and puffing than the wolf on three little pigs crib, Lisa was packing her bags for drama school and the bright lights of London and Alana pirouetted and burled into dance school. Five years swam by, alone but united over drunken phone calls and a Whatsapp conversation the length of the Nile. *warning major condensing of a story and conversation created for entertainment/speed purposes*

“That Verge Magazine wants to make us the face of it and we’ve always wanted to do presenting, shall we gie it a bash.”
“But I really don’t want to work with you, you annoy me and people will think we’re Jedward.“
“But we’ll get to go really cool places and meet cool people and DJ all over the world.”
“Aye. Alright.”

There you have it, Our lives. We’ll bore you with stories of teaching the Queen the Macarena, walking up Niagara Falls dressed as the Chuckle Brothers and being the first set of twins to surf around the universe on a slice of Edam later…

Lets get the important things out the way before we answer the BIG FIVE “Sorry I know you must be really bored of twin chat, but can I just ask…” questions. (Just as an aside, if we weren’t doppelgängers we would ask the EXACT same questions so no judgement.)
We do not always get on, in fact we get on about 3% of the time, unless there’s alcohol involved then it sits at a strong 90%.
We have never kissed, that is incest.
We HATE wearing the same thing.
We do not have any other siblings so we DONT KNOW if the “twin bond” is different.
Our boyfriends are both comedians and kinda look the same – we honestly don’t know how this happened, in fact, it’s a bit gross.
We find the whole sharing a face situation just as weird as you do.
Just because you’ve seen porn videos with twins sexing does not mean we do it and we also don’t giggle with our tops off for lads’ mags.
We promise this is the last time we’ll talk about being twins in this manner – we are doing proper things with it like using our bodies for science and shiz.

Now for the main course:

Do you feel each others pain?
Erm no, only when we’re inflicting it on each other. However, Lisa did once pretend she could feel it when Alana broke her arm for attention, then we tried for 48 hours to break her arm in the kitchen door. Does that count?

How long can you be separated for?
Surprisingly, if we spend some time apart, we do not oxidise and shrivel into tiny balls. The simple answer to that question is ‘as long as possible’. Google will no doubt throw up all sorts of tales if you want to find some freakier case studies.

Do you fight over or share boys?
We do not require anything extra in our lives to fight over and we cannot even share a car from London to Birmingham never mind a smelly boy. And who says we’re both into just boys? Huh? We did, however, meet another set of twins our age recently who said they fight over lads all the time and love the competition – but they did seem deeply unhappy and sighed an awful lot. Probably lamenting the life they could’ve had. YOU CAN GALS! We’re living it. Just pick different ones. Think of it like Ben and Jerry’s flavours or something; they’re all pretty sweet, One of you go for the Baked Alaska and the other one munch the Cookie Dough and you can always swap if you’re that way inclined.

Who is the good twin and who is the evil twin?
We are not warlocks. One of us does not have to spawn from the underworld while the other floated in from a cloud. Like average human beings, we BOTH equally teeter on the edge of good and evil. According to Mother Mac, we did used to ‘take turns’ in misbehaviour, but presumably that was through default/common sense rather than satanic possession.

Can I have a threesome?
Ah the glittering finale question and, rather worryingly, the most frequent of them all. Our polished and rehearsed retort proceeds as follows:

Hopeful enquirer: Can I have a threesome?
Macs: Do you have a brother or sister?
Hopeful enquirer: Yes.
Macs: Can they come too?
Hopeful enquirer: *silence. Sheepishly sulks off*

As a disclaimer we should probably add that there are twins that feel each other’s pain, can’t bear to be separated, share boyfriends, adopt good and evil roles and quite possibly have threesomes, but they are the exception, not the rule and are probably on Jeremy Kyle or looking for some spare cash/a coveted spot on Big Brother.

And for dessert, we typed “twins” into Google and the top four searches were:

Twins UK
Twins Boxing Gloves
Twins with different fathers
Twins Movie

We have nothing to conclude from these findings, other than our mother must’ve created number two during our ‘physical fights’ phase around aged 11. Hold on, on further research it is actually a brand of boxing gloves – wondered where Mum was getting all that spare cash for her cruises.

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